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Friday, May 31, 2013

Most stories about the president's health care law these days are about the challenges of implementation and the complexity of setting up exchanges. But that's not where the action is.

What's more important is that insurance companies, benefits consultants and others are actually reading the 2,000-page law to see what it says.

Perhaps the biggest news came last week when The Wall Street Journal reported that the mandates for comprehensive coverage apply to just 30 million out of 160 million Americans with private insurance: "A close reading of the rules makes it clear that those mandates affect only plans sponsored by insurers that are sold to small businesses and individuals, federal officials confirm."

Companies can avoid many of the financial penalties by offering only minimal insurance coverage costing as little as $40 a month. It doesn't mean they will all offer such skimpy coverage, but there's a lot of flexibility between those skinny plans and the very high cost of meeting the mandated coverage requirement.

Earlier, The New York Times had reported that there was another way around the mandates: "Companies can avoid many standards in the new law by insuring their own employees." Government regulators are busily trying to stop companies from taking that option.

Still, the law as written forces very few companies to offer the comprehensive coverage that President Obama envisioned. There will be little public pressure to change that. The debate is no longer about whether the government or insurance companies select an individual's insurance coverage. Now, it will be decided by consumers.

Most Americans recognize that there are natural trade-offs in the health insurance debate. Seven out of 10 believe that as the cost of providing insurance goes up, companies are likely to offer smaller paychecks to make up the difference. A similar majority believes companies also will respond by hiring fewer workers.

A key premise of the president's plan is that people will want the gold-plated insurance coverage they tried to mandate, but advocates of the plan dramatically misread the public mood. Only 28 percent of voters believe the top priority should be guaranteeing comprehensive insurance coverage for all workers. Sixty-six percent think it's more important to let workers pick their own mix of insurance coverage and take-home pay.

If they had a choice, 59 percent would choose a less expensive health insurance plan that covered only major medical expenses and a bigger paycheck. Even a majority of those in the president's party would select that option.

Just to be clear, everyone would still have high quality insurance. Some, though, would pay for routine office visits out of pocket and use their insurance just for the big and unpleasant surprises that sometimes come our way. They'd be able to afford it because their paycheck would be bigger each week. Others would opt for the security of having everything paid for by their insurance company.

In that environment, employers will compete to find the best mix of pay and benefits needed to recruit good employees.

As consumers opt for less coverage and more take-home pay, they will effectively repeal a major portion of the president's health care law.

To find out more about Scott Rasmussen, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

There are 47 separate Obamacare provisions that require involvement from the agency. The IRS is tasked with implementing the law’s required purchase of health coverage, checking whether millions of Americans are in compliance.

The IRS has so much work to do on the Affordable Care Act that it’s come up with an incredibly detailedorganization chart, published last year in a Government Accountability Office report.

Indeed, Obama’s own Treasury Department said earlier this year that the IRS will play a major role in implementing Obamacare.

"Revenue provisions contained in the legislation are designed to generate $438 billion to help pay for the overall cost of health care reform. More than 40 of these provisions added to or amended the Internal Revenue Code and represent the largest set of tax law changes the IRS has had to implement in more than 20 years,” said Obama’s Treasury Department in areport.

As CNNMoney reporter Jeanne Sahadi notes, the IRS will also: collect information from employers and insurers, determine who qualifies for subsidies or Medicaid, decide which individuals must pay penalties, and penalize employers that fail to provide their employees affordable coverage.

“The official who oversaw the targeting of tea party groups is now in charge of implementing Obamacare at the IRS,” said Cornyn. “Now more than ever, we need to prevent the IRS from having any role in Americans’ health care.”

Whether the GOP will prove successful in removing the IRS from its major role as stipulated in the Obamacare bill remains to be seen.

Either way, 2,137 IRS agents are presently fast at work getting Obamacare ready for its January 2014 grand opening.

A decade ago, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and his colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee were presiding over the lowest interest rates since WWII. The terrorist attack on September of 2001 had spurred the central bank to reverse course and ease tighter policy put in place to cool the financial bubble in technology stocks. The reason for this change in interest rate policy was to arrest any negative economic response from the dastardly act on 9/11.

But the long-term negative impact of that decision by the Fed continues to color our economic life even today. No matter your good intentions as a central banker, attempting to fine tune the economy is a dangerous act of folly. In my last comment, “Bernanke’s Housing Bubble is Unsustainable,” we talked about why the Fed’s policies have created an unsustainable situation in the housing sector. The impending problems stemming from the latest round of Fed interest rate ease have begun to emerge in the past week, with financial markets showing more volatility than has been seen in years. But the chief problem facing financial markets is the total lack of independence from the White House of the Bernanke Fed.

“If Bernanke had put even a modest tightening in place at his first FIMC meeting at the end of January 2006, he would have had board support and would have established his Independence,” notes a veteran Republican staffer on Capitol Hill who’s followed Fed policy for three decades. “He didn't and the market's had its spurs into him ever since.”

The 2006 timeframe is crucial to understanding why current Fed policy is likely to end in tears. By the middle of that year, banks like Countrywide and Washington Mutual were already showing visible signs of distress. But Ben Bernanke and his Republican-appointed colleagues on the FOMC did nothing, turning aside warnings from credible Wall Street observers that the subprime debt market was about to collapse. But Bernanke’s FOMC kept interest rates low until the start of 2008, a critical mistake.

Since it is assumed that Chairman Bernanke is leaving the Fed at the end of his term next July, the natural expectation is for the outgoing chairman to keep the froth up. Greenspan did the same, to his discredit, and Bernanke will too because the entire FOMC, who are mostly left-of-center Obama appointees, is on board for endless interest rate ease. This fact is what is really driving fears in the financial markets.

Had Bernanke raised interest rates even a smidgen in 2006, the subprime crisis would have been far less serious. Much of the worst subprime loan production came after 2006, let us recall, but to his credit, Bernanke has accepted responsibility for this error. Yet he is doing the very same thing again as we all watch. The collegial Bernanke is too worried about his public image and transparency that he has forgotten that part of this job is to say “no” occasionally to the White House and Congress.

The failure of Bernanke’s FOMC to pull back on low interest rate policy is already causing turmoil in the financial markets. Over the past several weeks, yields on Treasury debt have risen more than a half a point and bond prices have fallen proportionately. In the mortgage market, the current coupon for agency securities has risen almost a point in the past month, so that the on-the-run coupon for GNMA securities is almost three percent. Home loan rates for consumers are rising rapidly as a result.

The public REITs, commercial banks, and exchange traded funds which own debt securities using leverage and fund themselves in the short-term markets are under growing stress. Again, had Bernanke slowed Fed interest rate ease several years ago, we would not today be looking at bubbles in the debt and equity markets alike. Instead we now face a replay of the 2007 market liquidity crisis as smaller, more limited short term debt markets are tested. As and when the Fed does eventually shift policy in a formal sense, there could be a significant market retreat. Indeed, it seemingly is already underway.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

(CNSNews.com) – The Senate immigration legislation that includes access to federal entitlement programs for illegal aliens after a waiting period is a “travesty” and “an assault on the U.S. taxpayer,” Robert Rector, senior research fellow on domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, said an event on Wednesday at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

CNSNews.com asked Rector and other panelists at the discussion about past U.S. immigration policy when immigrants coming into the country were required to show that they could earn a livelihood and would not become a ward of the state.

It is appropriate that the worst scandal of the Obama administration- the IRS targeting of conservatives - is a scandal of administrators and bureaucrats, of otherwise faceless people endowed with immense power over their fellow citizens and running free of serious oversight from elected officials.

They are the shock troops of the vast bureaucratic apparatus of the federal government. Its growth has been one of President Obama's chief goals, and the one he has had the most success in achieving. He has greatly enhanced the reach and power of regulatory agencies that are an inherent offense against self-government, even when they aren't enforcing the law in a biased way.

The administration's corruption isn't bags of cash or lies about interns; it is the distortion of our form of government by sidestepping democratic procedures and accountability and vesting authority in bureaucrats. The administrative state is, fundamentally, the Lois Lerner state.

In an excellent essay in the journal National Affairs, Chris DeMuth calls the regulatory agency "the most potent institutional innovation in American government since the Constitution." He notes that the regulatory state has three hallmarks, at least since the 1970s when its independent power began to grow.

One, Congress delegates lawmaking to the agencies by giving them massive discretion in implementing the vaguest of mandates. Two, there are no constraints on their effective spending power since the costs of their rules "are borne almost entirely by the private sector." Third, they enjoy "relative insulation from public debate and criticism."

Needless to say, this is not how American government is supposed to work. It reflects the mindset of the Progressives rather than the Founders. "The Constitution was designed," DeMuth writes, "to make lawmaking cumbersome, representative, and consensual; the regulatory agency was a workaround, designed to make lawmaking efficient, specialized, and purposeful. It was a way to accommodate growing demands for government intervention in the face of the constitutional bias for limited government."

And it has worked: "It has enabled the federal government of a vast, populous, diverse democracy to partake directly in the everyday affairs of scores of millions of citizens and businesses." Some of them, like the conservative organizations that applied for 501(c)(4) status and got harassed by the IRS for their temerity, we hear about; most we don't.

The administrative state is an open invitation to high-handedness. My colleague Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a piece for Bloomberg View on Obama's lawlessness. Most of the examples have to do with the administration ignoring or distorting the laws via the bureaucracy. Obamacare says that states have to set up exchanges before the subsidies and penalties in the law apply? No matter. The IRS says it will pay out subsidies and impose penalties regardless of whether states set up exchanges.

We have immigration laws such that providing an amnesty for so-called DREAM kids would require a new statute? Not to worry. The president simply directed his agencies to ignore the law and institute a version of the DREAM Act.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the IRS scandal is organically connected to the president's signature initiative, Obamacare. Sarah Hall Ingram had been commissioner of the tax exempt and government entities division of the IRS, and now is in charge of the Obamacare office at the IRS. Looked at from one angle, Obamacare is less a health-care law than an expansion of IRS power.

The IRS needs about 2,000 additional full-time equivalent employees to undertake what one agency official calls "the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history."

As a general matter, if there is a characteristic line in the major legislative initiatives of the Obama administration it is "the secretary shall...." The secretary of Health and Human services shall figure out how to make Obamacare work, and although they aren't secretaries, the heads of an alphabet soup of financial agencies shall do the same for Dodd-Frank. Meanwhile, Congress works on the next sprawling enterprise it wants to set in motion and hand over to the administrative state.

Currently, it is the Gang of 8 immigration bill. Its architects want to do for immigration what Obamacare does for health care and Dodd-Frank does for the financial sector - invest an administrator (in this case the secretary of the department of Homeland Security) with extraordinary discretion, and entrust a bureaucracy with an enormous task beyond its capacities (the orderly, rapid processing of 11 million illegal aliens).

In Washington, the power of the administrative state always grows. It needs one, two, many Lois Lerners. The IRS official has already taken a fall, and may be headed for an even steeper one. But there are many more like her. They are indispensable to government by and for the regulators.

Publicly released records show that embattled former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times during the Obama administration, more recorded visits than even the most trusted members of the president’s Cabinet.

Obama officials who’ve visited the White House (As prepared by The Daily Caller)

Shulman’s extensive access to the White House first came to light during his testimony last week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Shulman gave assorted answers when asked why he had visited the White House 118 times during the period that the IRS was targeting tea party and conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny and delays on their tax-exempt applications.

By contrast, Shulman’s predecessor Mark Everson only visited the White House once during four years of service in the George W. Bush administration and compared the IRS’s remoteness from the president to “Siberia.” But the scope of Shulman’s White House visits — which strongly suggests coordination by White House officials in the campaign against the president’s political opponents — is even more striking in comparison to the publicly recorded access of Cabinet members.

(CNSNews.com) - A record 72,600,000 were enrolled in Medicaid for at least one month in fiscal 2012, up from 71,700,000 in fiscal 2011, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), which provides an annual report to Congress on Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
The 72,600,000 enrolled in Medicaid in the United States in 2012 was more than the 65,630,692 people who lived in France last year, according to data published by the Census Bureau, or the 63,047,162 people who lived in the United Kingdom.
In fact, if Medicaid was a country rather than a U.S. government program it would be the twentieth most populous nation in the world, ranking just ahead of Thailand, which had 67,091,089 people in 2012, and just behind the Congo, which had 73,599,190 people in 2012.
Funded by both the federal and state governments, Medicaid was created in 1965 by the same law that created Medicare. It is designed to provide health-care coverage to low-income Americans.
In fiscal 2008, the last full year before President Barack Obama took office, there were 58,794,000 Medicaid enrollees. Since then, Medicaid enrollment has expanded by more than 23 percent.
According to the Census Bureau, the total population of the United States was 314,332,190 in September 2012, the last month of fiscal 2012. That means the 72,600,000 who were enrolled in Medicaid at some time during the year equaled about 23 percent of the population--or almost one out of every four people.

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BILL O’REILLY, HOST: Let's go Chris Christie, Obama down at the Jersey Shore. I was looking for Bruce Springsteen. Didn't see him. But the buddies were there again.

DENNIS MILLER: They’re cute. They’re cute together.

O’REILLY: Are they?

MILLER: It's like Danny Zuko and Sandy in “Grease.” They’re so cute together.

O’REILLY: Who’s Sandy?

MILLER: Of course.

O’REILLY: Who’s Olivia Newton-John. Which one?

MILLER: She's a little chunky in this one, but obviously he looks up to her. Wins her a plush doll. It's exciting. And you know, Obama throws like a girlie man. So, it's nice to watch Christie.

Look at Chris. It's tough for him to get into the reflective glory of anybody, because I know he’s also had the stapling done, and I think Obama likes to come in and ask him if he can figure out a way to staple Biden's mouth shut, work at that end of the alimentary canal.

The IRS, Obamacare, and other pains in Barack Obama’s tuchis.

There’s something that I am quite happy to point out about the Obamacare jam (H/T: Hot Air) that Democrats are finding themselves in right now…

Conservative groups are preparing to use the deepening public distrust of the Internal Revenue Service to discredit the Affordable Care Act, and the Democrats who support it, in the 2014 election cycle.

Now that the IRS has admitted to unfairly targeting conservative groupsseeking tax-exempt status, Republicans plan to make the agency, which is responsible for carrying out much of President Obama’s health care law, the poster child for dysfunctional government, and a giant liability for Democrats.

…and that’s that this problem has been made particularly difficult for the Obama administration because of a ruling that they ironically crowed about; i.e., that the US Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate in Obamacare is constitutional because it’s a tax. This, of course, was the subject of much consternation and rhetoric and goings-on at the time; but I can’t help but note that the Obama administration is more or less stuck now with having the IRS all-in on Obamacare’s implementation. This would be the IRS that has been already engaged in a multi-office* none-dare-call-it-conspiracy to target conservative groups. The IRS whose officials are currently lawyering up and taking the Fifth. The IRS who has assigned Sarah Hall Ingram (the commissioner who oversaw the aforementioned targeting) to oversee Obamacare’s implementation. The IRS, not at all coincidentally, whose reputation has taken an absolute nose dive since Obama took office. And the IRS which will be slapped with multiple injunctions the second it tries to actually get a dime of Obamacare tax out of a conservative group or institution.

You may or may not decide that all of this means that maybe, just maybe, Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts actually crafted a rather elegant trap for a President who probably professionally – or professorially – offends Roberts (after all, the Chief Justice actually is a Constitutional scholar) by giving Obama and Congressional Democrats what they wanted, nice and hard. Hindsight is, after all, 20/20: it happens all the time that people look at events after the fact and find patterns there. It still does need to be pointed out that life isn’t quite as much kittens and sunshine for Barack Obama as it appeared to be, the morning when the US Supreme Court threw down its four-dimensional split decision on Obamacare. Particularly since said decision simultaneously removed any hope of using the Commerce Clause to justify getting the IRS out of the Obamacare enforcement business.

*Quick note to Ezra Klein: sometimes when you pull over the black guy for DWB, he turns out to have done something wrong. Does that mean that Driving While Black is thus a legitimate law enforcement strategy?

This treaty is ostensibly aimed at putting an end to gun trafficking across international boundaries, and both Breitbart News and the NRA have argued that it will eventually require an international gun registry in order to be enforceable.

The ATT also provides the executive branch of our government with broad powers for controlling which guns do and don't come into the country, and includes ambiguous language that a gun-control-friendly administration can use to its advantage.

Even though Obama will sign this treaty, it is not enforceable in the U.S. until the Senate ratifies it by a two-thirds majority.

For the time being, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has pushed through an amendment opposing the treaty. However, Obama's signature will open the door for the Senate to reconsider a resolution of ratification at a future date.

In the months before President Obama declared al Qaeda was “on a path to defeat,” his aides were telling Congress that the terrorist network was expanding and was capable of inflicting mass casualties in the U.S.

While perhaps not a direct contradiction of the president’s near-claim of victory last week, their testimony painted the picture of a robust collection of al Qaeda franchises causing death and destruction in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Mali, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Terrorism analysts say that as the U.S. conducted a concentrated air war via armed Predators against al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan’s tribal areas for more than a decade, the group’s Islamic chieftains decided to diversify.

“I totally disagree with the premise that al Qaeda is on the path to defeat,” said retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, who has advised U.S. commanders in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “Quite the contrary, al Qaeda has deliberately decentralized its operations, not because of the relentless attacks we have had on its national leadership in Pakistan, but because its strategic objective is to dominate and control Muslim countries in the region. As such, al Qaeda must extend its geographic reach, which is not only successful but is expanding.”

Three al Qaeda franchises are most notable: al Qaeda in Iraq, which has rebuilt and stepped up attacks since the last American troops left in 2011 and has moved fighters into Syria; al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a North Africa-based network aligned with Ansar al Shariah, which carried out the deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya; and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a Yemen-based cell that sponsored the failed 2009 airliner attack by “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

The IRS Committed Political Sabotage:
The world is learning about the corruption of the IRS in targeting conservative groups, including various Tea Party organizations, for heightened scrutiny. But the corruption goes much deeper than ...

Obama's Tactics Straight Out of Chicago Playbook:
The scandals swirling around the Obama administration have many journalists scratching their heads as to how "hope and change" seem to have been supplanted by "arrogance and fear." Perhaps it's tim...

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

It's been a bad few weeks for cultural assimilation. Last month, two welfare-receiving immigrants in the United States, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. By the end of the week, they had murdered a cop and engaged in a wild shoot-out and bomb-throwing melee with the police.

Last week, a couple of ethnic Nigerians butchered a British soldier with meat cleavers in broad daylight on a bustling street in a London suburb, then boasted about the murder in video interviews with bystanders. (On the bright side, they did not claim to be princes and ask for your life savings.)

Also last week, immigrants, mostly Muslims, began rioting in peaceful Sweden -- burning schools to the ground, torching cars and throwing rocks at the police. (Who among us hasn't lost his temper trying to assemble an Ikea china cabinet?)

Supporters of the West's current immigration policies can't keep ducking reality. So they try to shut down debate by calling their opponents racists, xenophobes, know-nothings and fascists.The English Defense League (EDL), for example, is portrayed in the media as a bunch of racist football hooligans. So I was surprised to learn that the EDL has not only a Jewish division, but a gay division. (Harvey Fierstein could be their president!) They expressly support Israel against Muslim terror and burn Nazi flags at their rallies.

Apparently it is considered "fascist" to oppose actual fascists immigrating to your country.

A few years ago, an opinion piece in The New York Times denounced the pro-gay positions of anti-immigration groups such as the EDL for "co-opting" gays. The co-opting is so thoroughgoing that the anti-immigration Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was himself gay. He was assassinated by a vegan animal rights activist upset at criticism of Muslims.

But surely members of the EDL oppose Britain's immigration policies out of ignorance?

It briefly seemed so. A month ago, the head of the EDL, Tommy Robinson, provoked a round of liberal sneering when he tweeted: "welcome to twitter homepage has a picture of a mosque. what a joke." Various media outlets leapt to point out that the photo was, actually, the Taj Mahal.

The liberal Guardian mocked: "It's worth pointing out that the 'mosque' that started this ... was in fact the Taj Mahal, the marble mausoleum in India. It's almost as if the very existence of the EDL is based on false information, suspicion and idiocy."

Except -- oops --- it wasn't the Taj Mahal. It was a mosque -- the Grand Mosque in Muscat, Oman, to be precise -- as The Guardian quietly admitted in an altered photo caption after stealthily removing the comment about the EDL's "idiocy" for imagining it was a mosque. It's almost as if the very existence of The Guardian is based on false information, suspicion and idiocy.

Britain, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain have recently enacted, or are considering enacting, further restrictions on immigration, alarming immigration enthusiasts. The New York Times reported this week that the "right-wing Swiss People's Party" is requesting a referendum on immigration.

Wait a second! A referendum doesn't sound fascist at all. In fact and to the contrary, it's always the advocates of unrestricted immigration who try to avoid letting the people vote. Marco Rubio and the rest of the pro-amnesty "Gang of Eight" don't even want the country to know they're about to vote on a mass immigration scheme.

Liberals say, "Basic human rights are not subject to a vote!" -- and then define "basic human rights" as "the right of people who don't live in your country to move there."

Manifestly, opponents of open immigration are not fascists, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, intolerant or idiots. But as long as we're on the subject, may we inquire into the tolerance and other Western values of the potential immigrants themselves?

Last week, U.S. law enforcement officials reported that Muslim immigrant Ibragim Todashev admitted that he and Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev had murdered three Jewish men in a Boston suburb on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack. (Which also, I believe, was the work of immigrants.) The victims' throats were cut from ear to ear, nearly decapitating them. One was Tamerlan's best friend.

Searching The New York Times' webpage for "English Defense League," turns up this multicultural story out of Saudi Arabia: "Online Campaign Draws Attention to Case of Saudi Father Accused of Rape and Torture." The father, Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a prominent Islamic cleric, served only a few months in a Saudi Arabian prison for allegedly raping, burning and fatally beating his own 5-year-old daughter.

It's not just Muslims who aren't warming to Western values. Polls by the Anti-Defamation League going back decades have shown a steady decline of anti-Semitism in the U.S. But a 2002 poll showed a surprising upsurge.While 17 percent of all Americans were said to hold "strongly anti-Semitic" views, 35 percent of Hispanics did -- as did 44 percent of foreign-born Hispanics.

(Note to Sheldon Adelson: It may be time to give your Hispanic employees a raise.)

Liberals get a kick out of accusing their opponents of what they themselves are guilty of. But this may be the most audacious reverse-guilt play yet. For objecting to the importation of primitive, violent, child-rape-forgiving bigots, the opponents of mass immigration are accused of bigotry.

Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material well-being. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place — that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.

The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature.

Eric Holder Has Doubts About Eric Holder:
President Barack Obama has been mocked for learning about untoward conduct in his administration from the press. But he's on the ball compared with his attorney general, who wouldn't know about his...

(CNSNews.com) - The total number of people in the United States now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,978,040 in May, up from 10,962,532 million in April, according to newly released datafrom the Social Security Administration.

The 10,978,040 disability beneficiaries in the United States now exceed the population of all but seven states. For example, there are more Americans collecting disability today than there are people living in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey or Virginia.

The record 10,978,040 total disability beneficiaries in May, included a record 8,877,921 disabled workers (up from 8,865,586 in April), a record 1,939,687 children of disabled workers (up from 1,936,236 in April), and 160,432 spouses of disabled workers.

May was the 196th straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January 1997. That month the number of workers taking disability dropped by 249 people—from 4,385,623 in December 1996 to 4,385,374 in January 1997.

As the overall number of American workers collecting disability has increased, the ratio of full-time workers to disability-collecting workers has decreased.

In December 1968, 1,295,428 American workers collected disability and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 65,630,000 worked full-time. Thus, there were about 51 full-time workers for each worker collecting disability. In May 2013, with a record 8,877,921 American workers collecting disability and 116,053,000 working full-time, there were only 13 Americans working full-time for each worker on disability.